Posted tagged ‘English Language Arts’

Are you looking for ideas for the last days of school, a summer gift for your students, and a way to support students and families in sustaining reading and writing progress over the summer? Our Summer Reading and Writing Journalwill help students set goals for summer reading and writing during the last days of school. Summer Reading and Writing Journal works great for a summer reading class, too. This product includes:

P is for Poetry Journal. Six poem formats that include samples, practice pages, and final draft pages. Poems are word play and provide the reader another way of looking at something familiar and perhaps not so familiar. This packet works well as mini-unit for the first or last days of school. During the first days of school, it gives you an opportunity to learn about your students and perhaps some of their strengths. At the end of the school year, it provides an entertaining way to end the year and something wonderful to send home to parents. The six poetic formats are:

O is for open discussion. How do teachers get students to talk in class, about the class topic? We all know that it just doesn’t happen without planning. Discussion Techniques for the Classroom can facilitate meaningful talk among students and because of the novelty of these techniques, they catch students’ attention. Techniques include:

mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine is one of my favorite novels—you smile, laugh, sniffle, cry. We developed a unit and a discussion and activity guide for mockingbird, which stand on their own or work together. Both products are grounded in best practice and use a wide variety of strategies that include step-by-step guidelines for implementation as well as handouts that facilitate that implementation. Our research and our work with classroom teachers over the years indicated to us that sharing how to implement best practice saved teachers time and increased the use of best practice in the classroom. Our goal with all of our products is to engage students and facilitate implementation for teachers.

I is for Ivan as in The One and Only Ivan, a wonderful novel with lessons for both kids and adults. The novel is based on a true story, a gorilla in Atlanta. We were all taken with the novel and the nonfiction book, Ivan the Remarkable True Story of the Shopping Mall Gorilla. So, we created a unit for the novel and a read-along guide for the nonfiction book—both pair well. And, then of course we had to add bookmarks, which are free. Give yourself, your students, and/or your children or grandchildren a treat—read both books!

E is for Esperanza Rising, a novel by Pam Muñoz Ryan. The first time this novel came onto my radar was when my granddaughter was reading it in fourth grade. She is an avid reader and lucky for me, loves to discuss what she is reading with me. I suppose we are both book nerds—nothing wrong with that.

A few years later I picked up the novel to consider for a novel study and her retelling came back to me as well as how meaningful the novel was to her. As I read it I was taken with how the author titled each chapter with the name of a food that was relevant to that chapter. Then I thought it would be fun to create a novel study that focused primarily on each food as well as how that food was symbolic of the ongoing story. So the Enrichment Activities Connected to Chapter Foods emerged. This product includes:

One of my favorite blogs is Compulsively Quirky written by Irene. Recently she published a blog about the A to Z Challenge. “For the past several weeks, I’ve been toying with the idea of participating in the 2017 AtoZ Challenge. Every April, bloggers write their way through the month publishing a post each day except Sunday based on every letter of the alphabet.

While I don’t think I can blog my way through the alphabet in one month, I am going to attempt to post a blog based on every letter of the alphabet in the coming weeks. My theme focuses on products my colleagues and I have created for Teachers Pay Teachers. The comments we receive regarding our products communicates to us that we are making a difference for teachers and students. So while I share a little history and description of our products, I hope you might pick up some tidbits and tactics for the classroom. And, who doesn’t love a thematic alphabetical list?

A is for Animal Farm, a novel by George Orwell, is more relevant today than ever. It’s a short novel, but worth reading or reading again. Some of the propaganda tools used in the novel appear to be the playbook for the current administration. Animal Farm is the perfect novel to illustrate George Santayana’s quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The Discussion and Activity Guide is a great tool for classroom book clubs, independent studies, and community-wide reads. The unit works very well for a whole class study of the novel including propaganda techniques used in the past and present.